


dirgemaker

by Mythopoeia



Series: All That Glitters: Gold Rush!AU [78]
Category: TOLKIEN J. R. R. - Works & Related Fandoms, The Silmarillion and other histories of Middle-Earth - J. R. R. Tolkien
Genre: 1850s AU, Angband, Angst, Blood, Curufin does, Dreams and Nightmares, Gen, Gold Rush AU, Irish American Feanorians, Language, Maglor does not want to lead, Time to negotiate Maedhros’ release from Angband, Violence, maglor loves mae very much unfortunately
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-19
Updated: 2019-05-27
Packaged: 2020-03-08 04:45:17
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 4
Words: 12,406
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18887440
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Mythopoeia/pseuds/Mythopoeia
Summary: “Then your brother dies,” she says. “A single bullet to ruin that lovely face, and any number of ravines to throw the body down. Deny my master any of his desires, and you shall never see your Maitimo again.”I have seen what a bullet to the skull does, before. The bullet has been mine.This bullet, too, shall be mine.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Life must go on,  
> And the dead be forgotten;  
> Life must go on,  
> Though good men die;  
> Anne, eat your breakfast;  
> Dan, take your medicine;  
> Life must go on;  
> I forget just why.
> 
> - _Lament_ , Edna St. Vincent Millay

“I wish I had talent like yours,” Maedhros tells me abruptly as he watches me begin to pack my fiddle away in its battered case. He is pleasantly drunk, and very agreeable, perching carelessly on the arm of one of Grandfather Finwe’s velvet sofas so that he might peer over my shoulder. I told him he could go upstairs ahead of me, but Maedhros, already so habitually open with his affections, is always a little clingier when he has been drinking. He once confessed to me that he hates to be alone, in this house, and so I do not insist he leave me and go to bed. 

I am fifteen, which means Maedhros is seventeen, and tonight we have finally said our polite farewells to Uncle Fingolfin and his family, who were here at Grandfather Finwe’s house for a dinner party. After dinner we had enjoyed coffee and a little brandy in our grandfather’s drawing room, and as the evening grew late and polite conversation grew thin Grandfather Finwe had taken out his beautiful old gold-fretted fiddle to entertain the gathered company with a song or two. When Indis suggested that I fetch my own fiddle down from my room so that I might accompany him, I had been too weak to make my excuses. 

I love few things as much as I love listening to our grandfather play, but I am always happiest when I am creating music myself. 

(Uncle Fingolfin had complimented my skill, when I finished playing the new reel I had recently begun learning as part of my musical studies. Tongue-tied, I had not known whether to feel flattered by the compliment, or ashamed.)

“You are not untalented,” I reply now to Maedhros, amused by the very notion. “Did Athair never show you anything of the fiddle at all, when you were young? I thought you simply were not interested in music.”

“Hm,” is what Maedhros says, frowning thoughtfully. “He did, a little; but I was very young. You were outstripping me already when you were but three years old, you know, and I figured I had best give it up.”

I blink, surprised: “I didn’t know that.”

My brother gives me a quick look, and shrugs lightly, leaning forward to pluck the bow from where I had set it on the coffee table. He turns it loosely over in his hands, testing the weight like I have seen him test the weight of a new gun, back home in Formenos.

“I could teach you sometimes, if you like,” I offer suddenly. Maedhros looks at me in surprise, brows lifted, and begins to protest something about not having the time, but I show him with a sweep of my arm the empty drawing room about us. 

“Oh come, Maitimo; we certainly have enough dull hours we don’t know what to do with, since we came to New York. You cannot tell me you are occupied with your studies and society parties every evening, because I know it isn’t true. I could ask Grandfather to allow me to borrow his fiddle, and you could learn on mine.”

Maedhros hesitates.

“I liked the reel you played tonight,” he says abruptly. “How about you teach me that?”

Now it is my turn to be surprised. “What,” I say, stupidly: “Now?”

“Certainly, why not? I do not feel as though I shall be sleepy for hours yet, and as you say, there is little else to do. Let’s have a trial of it, at the least.”

“I cannot simply teach you the _Tam Lin_ ,” I protest, aghast at the blasphemy even as his enthusiasm rises. “We will have to start at the beginning first, with scales and music reading and form—“

“But I don’t care about scales,” Maedhros informs me, very sincerely.

I gape, at a loss for words. I almost think he must be having some fun at my expense, except there is no guile in his brightened expression, and he holds his left hand out expectantly for my fiddle, the bow already in his right. 

“Macalaure,” he insists charmingly, turning upon me his most pitiful eyes, and I groan, finally giving up my dearest possession to his eager hands. 

“Feel it against your collarbone, like so,” I instruct, trying to help him adjust the fiddle beneath his chin. My brother’s hands are slim, long-fingered, and graceful, like mine, but he holds my instrument like a weapon, and I quickly despair of getting his fidgeting fingers correct on the frets. He tilts his head awkwardly, trying to follow my guidance, but the angle only makes his hair fall forward into his eyes, obscuring his sight.

“Here,” I say for the dozenth time, repositioning his hand yet again. “No, _here_ —You must—your hair is too long!” I laugh, ruffling it affectionately. “You must cut it to a decent length again, if you wish to learn to play.” My brother’s hair is his one true vanity, for he grows it long on purpose, thinking it makes him look dashing. He ducks away from my meddling fingers with a yelp.

“It is scarcely longer than yours,” he protests, but he sweeps it back from his face anyway, and then repositions the fiddle beneath his chin, brow furrowed slightly in concentration as he tries to replicate the pose I had been so painstakingly helping him to achieve. 

It is not correct in the slightest, and I tell him so. 

“This is exactly how you showed me,” Maedhros retorts, stung, and his indignation sends me into a fit of giggles I cannot suppress, despite the hand I press to my mouth. I did not confine myself entirely to coffee, neither at dinner nor in the drawing room after, and I consider for the first time that I must be a little drunk, too.

“Go on then,” I say, when I regain my composure, and Maedhros sets bow to strings as though intent on proving a point, and forces from my poor Irish fiddle the saddest, most agonized sound I have ever heard, loud as a shriek in the late-night quiet of the house. Both of us freeze an instant, suddenly remembering our poor Grandfather retired to his bed in the room above us, and the next instant we are both of us dissolved into helpless laughter, fallen over each other on the sofa.

“You can say it, Maglor,” Maedhros manages to gasp at last, wiping tears from his eyes as he sprawls backwards on Grandfather Finwe’s sofa, scattering Idril’s decorative cushions onto the rug. “I’m hopeless.”

I open my mouth to tease him as invited 

(as I suddenly remember I _did_ tease him, when I was fifteen and he was seventeen and I thought this was what hopeless _meant_ —)

but there are unexpected tears in my eyes, too, as I look at my brother lying with his head tipped back, all unstrung with mirth, and suddenly—I don’t want to.

(Instead, I want to seize Maedhros in an embrace, to smell the blood-and-whiskey scent of him, to hold him so tightly I cannot breathe.)

(Instead, I want to wail _sorry, I am so very sorry_ into his scarred shoulder, to not let go of him until he wraps his arms around me, too, so that by that warmth I might know I am forgiven.)

Instead, I wake up weeping, to the sound of thunderous, frantic knocking at Rumil’s study door.


	2. Chapter 2

When I reach the inner courtyard I am short of breath, trembling as I skid to a halt and cast about frantically, seeking for familiar faces. The man who woke me from my sleep in Rumil’s study said only that _Your brothers have returned,_ and then, when I asked _All of them?_ He had replied only: _Not all_. I did not linger for further details, choosing to run down to the courtyard myself, instead, my heart beating so desperately I could feel it in my throat like something swallowed, something struggling and alive. 

I had not meant to fall asleep; I had not even thought it possible to sleep, not while all my brothers but one had vanished somewhere outside the safety of Mithrim’s walls, and not when the only one left behind was Curufin. My brother is still only barely sixteen, still growing into his limbs and his hands and his sharpening face, but already it is clear that he is made very closely in Athair’s image, and will begin to look only more like him as he ages. When he says my name, these days, his voice is so like Athair’s disapproving voice it sets my skin crawling. 

I miss my father with all my heart and more than my heart: with all my bones, with all my breath. But how am I to grieve, and how am I to move on, if the dead refuse to stay dead? It is perhaps unfair of me, to see Athair’s ghost increasingly in the living face of my younger brother, but I think he has recognized it too. Every time he has spoken my name, these last two days, he has smiled at the sight of my flinching. 

_(“Do not carry on so shamefully,” he had told me, as I lay stunned on the floor where Celegorm had knocked me, unable to do anything but weep. “If anyone can fix Maedhros’ mistakes, Celegorm can.”_

_The entire side of my face is still disfigured with dark bruises, although the swelling has gone down. No one in Mithrim, from Athair’s followers nor Rumil’s, has asked me how I received such a blow. I wonder if they have surmised enough they do not feel the need to question, or whether they simply do not care, and I wonder which is worse.)_

Curufin is not with me as I race to the main gate because he is in Athair’s mine. That dreadful hole is the only place he feels safe here, I think; also he knows as long as he is locked away in our father’s heart I shall not come find him. In the brief hours I have had to myself these last few days, when I have not been kept occupied with managing both the running and defense of the fort and the confidence of the men I am supposed to command, I have tried to split my time evenly between Rumil’s bedside and his office, where I wait for Curufin to reappear. I have barely eaten, and barely slept, and hardly felt the loss of either, lost as I am in this waking nightmare. 

(I think with a new sympathy of all the times I tried to force Maedhros to sleep, or to eat—but I cannot think of that, I cannot think of _him_ —)

By the time I am in view of the gate my brothers have already been let inside, and the gate is once again secured. There are already men and women gathered in a cluster in the shadow of the wall, with more running to join the swell of people even as I run, though they largely give way for me when they realize who I am. I ignore the rising muttering as I shove my way to the center of the crowd, silent only because I do not know whose name I should call, whose face I should hope to see.

(The man at my door, his frown visible even through his thick beard but nothing soft as pity in his weary eyes: _Not all._ )

There, standing uneasily amidst the press of Mithrim’s guards, are only two horses.

My knees must buckle, because a woman standing near me catches me by the elbow and braces me to standing, saying something I cannot understand through the sudden roaring in my ears. It is a lifetime too long, before I realize there are still three men—three boys—with those horses, however, two standing and one still in saddle. Sunset is falling quickly, shadows creeping long and dark purple across the ground, like old blood breaking beneath the skin of the world. But even in the dim light I can make out the colors of their hair: red, dark, gold.

Amras, Caranthir, Celegorm.

The hunter and the runaways have all three returned, but empty-handed. 

“Celegorm,” I cry, tearing myself free from the woman’s steadying grip, stumbling forward. 

Celegorm turns to me slowly, stiffly, moving like a wounded man moves, though I can see no blood on him. His head is bare of his usual wide-brimmed hat, and his golden hair, grown paler with all these months spent under the harsh Californian sun, is filthy with dust and dried mud. There is a streak of mud on the side of his jaw, too, dried clay that he does not seem to notice. As I try to approach him, Huan presses close to his flank, fixing me with those intelligent dark dog-eyes, and makes a sound torn between a growl and a whine.

I halt.

“Celegorm,” I manage to say again, more gently this time. “Are you hurt?”

Celegorm’s eyes are red, his face grey beneath his tan and the new stripe of burning across the bridge of his proud nose. His pupils are dilated so wide there is barely any of the blue-grey iris left.

“Our brothers are dead,” he says, in a voice with the heart cut out of it, and Caranthir, who is helping Amras down from the saddle, shudders though I cannot see his face. Amras folds forward, nearly collapsing fully into Caranthir’s arms, and Caranthir staggers back a pace, because my littlest brothers—my littlest _brother_ has grown so much, this past year, he is nearly as tall as me. 

Amras looks around for me wildly and, finding me, manages a single step in my direction, reaching for me with thin hands, his face stark white. Horribly, I am reminded of when the twins first learned to walk, and how they loved seeking us out with their unsteady baby steps, small hands reaching, wanting to be caught. 

“Maglor,” he says, my name breaking in his trembling mouth, and then his face crumples, and he drops to the ground, curling up where he lies like a dying thing, hands pulling at his hair, _screaming._

There are no words in his screaming, but it is the same sound Curufin made, when Athair stopped breathing. 

All around me, the muttering, which had gone briefly silent, rustles back in rising agitation. I hate them, all these strangers’ eyes watching my baby brother wail, but how can I send them away? I lunge forward to try to reach Amras, but before I can Caranthir is there, tears running silently down his cheeks as he tries to soothe Amras’ hysterics. And then someone catches me roughly by the shirtsleeve, yanking me back, and I look to see Celegorm there, his ashen face set beneath dried tear-tracks of his own.

“You cannot kneel,” he hisses, still in that terrible cold voice. “Not in front of them.”

“But Amras,” I begin, weakly, and Celegorm shakes me, a single sharp wrench, by that one arm. 

“You are our leader. Maedhros is not coming back. So show some goddamn authority, before you collapse on the ground with the crying _children._ ”

My eyes blur with tears, but I know Celegorm is right. Even—even Maedhros had known Celegorm was strongest, and had told me to allow his help. I fight to steady my breathing, to calm my throat, which has closed so tightly with grief. Mere feet from us, Amras is still screaming, though his voice is thinner now, raw and running out.

“Caranthir, get him inside,” I order, and my gentlest brother, his face flushed now with his own weeping, scrubs the sleeve of his jacket over his face, and heaves Amras to his feet. Amras curls into his shoulder, keening as Caranthir begins to guide them both towards our rooms. Seeing them go, Caranthir supporting a swaying Amras, red head close to dark, I am reminded suddenly like a blow of that night in Beleriand when Maedhros leaned on me, when Maedhros could barely walk, Maedhros with something ripped out of him that I didn’t understand fully, even then, maybe even now—

“Where is she?” One of Rumil’s men demands of Celegorm, and there are so many more of them crowded so much closer now, I must have—I must have lost some time, I cannot let myself lose time—

_(“Cousin Finrod has been asking you your opinion for five minutes now, Maglor,” Maedhros had laughed, swatting at my shoulder with the novel in his hand, and smiling as he asked: “Doesn’t the song in your head ever stop?”)_

No, no, no. I tear myself away from Maedhros, his laughing face and his teasing voice.

(The sound of Maedhros’ laughter is the first sound I remember loving.)

“You left Jemima lying unburied?” The man spits, outraged. There is a low, angry rumbling among the gathered crowd, and Celegorm stands tall, jaw working as he stares them all down. Huan is growling again, his long hound’s body tense at Celegorm’s side, and that is probably the only thing keeping Rumil’s folk back from seizing my brother—and, by extension, myself. In my haste I left Rumil’s study without my gun, without any weapon at all.

“If you care so much, _you_ track them to where they lie, and _you_ bury them,” Celegorm sneers, pushing forward towards the side of the barracks where our rooms are. The man steps to bar his way, shoving my brother back with one large hand.

“And where are your precious brothers, then? Did you leave them to rot, too?”

I don’t see Celegorm rip the gun from its holster, but it is suddenly in his hand, the muzzle shoved hard directly against the man’s barrel chest, and my brother the hunter, my brother who spent all his years of growing learning to track and kill wild things at the side of Orome our neighbor, is shaking all over except in the hand that holds the trigger.

“Get the _fuck_ out of my way,” Celegorm says.

An awful, utter silence falls, for the space of a breath, and then—an uproar. Dozens of hands go to dozens of belts for their own guns, their own knives, and I rush forward with hands raised, terrified by the look on my brother’s face as he does not lower the gun. 

“Celegorm,” I beg, reaching for his hand. “Celegorm, you are among friends, please—“

“No,” Celegorm replies, very clearly, not even glancing my way. “I’m not. And I’ll show him how dead things fucking rot, I’ll show the whole goddamn mess of them, if that’s what they want—“

“What is all this?” A new voice rises calm above the clamor, and shouldering his way through the mob is the man who woke me, the man with the dark beard and thick, dark brows, which are pulled low over his eyes, now, as he surveys the poor scene we make. He raises his hands for calm, and Rumil’s folk actually hesitate, because—I recognize him now, this is the man Maedhros left as head of Rumil’s contingent, the one who was first at our door, when Athair died. I have spoken with him directly only a bare handful of times, and I cannot remember his name. Maedhros would have known this man’s name, must have already known this man’s name. We were here the same number of days, so why don’t I?

The woman who had earlier helped me keep my footing answers him, her gaze no longer so kind. 

“Feanor’s boy says he left Jem lying dead in the woods like carrion. And he pulled a gun on Tom, Ulfang.” 

“He doesn’t mean it,” I say, my hand hovering near Celegorm’s wrist but not touching him, terrified that if I do try to wrest the gun from his grip he will pull the trigger. I have never seen him like this before; how can I know what he will do?

“My brother has been out on the trail for days, alone, and he found our brothers dead,” I manage to say, feeling the words numb against my lips as I force them out. “He is, as you say, a boy, and it is scarcely a week now since our father died. He does not know what he is doing, in his grief. Please, move aside and let me take him to our rooms. He has injured no one, and I will see he does no one harm until he is in his right mind again.”

The man the woman called Ulfang pulls his frown tighter as he looks from one of us to the other, but then he nods. 

“Tom, step back. Let him by.”

_But Jemima,_ someone begins to protest, and Ulfang raises his voice sharply: “I said, let the Irishman’s sons go. Tom, make yourself useful and stable the horses. We all of us have dead to mourn, it would seem, and tempers that need time to cool.” His pale eyes find mine as the crowd reluctantly moves back, hostility still thick in the air like a thunderstorm waiting to break.

“I will come find you later to get the full story,” he promises me, and I nod stiffly, as finally Celegorm lowers his gun. His lip is curled, showing the tips of his teeth as he grits his jaw, his eyes hot with hatred as he watches Tom, cowed but furious, retreat to the still-saddled horses. 

I reach for Celegorm’s hand, but he shoves me away. He does not reholster the gun, as he stalks towards our longhouse, Huan keeping pace. In the crowd, I see Homer watching me, and a few other of Athair’s men, too, some looking stricken, others looking more calculating. I meet Homer’s gaze and shake my head, very slightly. He catches my meaning, and drops his hand from the gun at his belt.

“Thank you,” I choke out to Ulfang, who nods back in his turn, and then I follow Celegorm indoors. 

*

Curufin does not scream or cry, when he meets us at Athair’s bedroom door—Athair’s room, which is now Curufin’s room, for he has claimed it ever since Celegorm left on his hunt. He is very pale, but very calm, as he stretches out his arms to our golden brother, wrapping him in an embrace Celegorm trembles against but does not shove away, not like how he refused my touch, in the courtyard. 

“There was nothing you could have done,” Curufin whispers soothingly, his eyes dry. “It isn’t your fault.”

“Who told you?” I demand, my voice too high, too thin. My eyes are not dry, but I have not yet succumbed to tears, though my grief be a dagger in my throat whenever I try to speak. I swallow it down. “Was it Caranthir?”

Curufin regards me with Athair’s eyes.

“I heard Amras wailing in the corridor,” he says, “and it does not take a great mind to know what that means. But no; I knew already. Did I not say it, before you left?” He directs this last back to Celegorm, holding him almost jealously, one hand reaching up so he might with his thumb rub away the traces of our brother’s tears. “I warned you that you would not find them alive.”

Despair comes easier to us now than hope, and it is safer, also; this is a truth I cannot shrink from, anymore. A scarce week ago, Maedhros tried to leave our father’s deathbed with hope, and see where it has gotten him. And Amrod, oh, my God, Amrod, our baby brother who thought there was a way to save himself—how quickly the world ends! For here I stand on the other side of the apocalypse, and Athair has been taken to God, and Amrod’s soul, too, is safe, and—And Maitimo, my _God_ , Maitimo—and I am left here in a fallen place where Celegorm can be cruel, and and Amras is no longer a twin, and Curufin can hear our brothers are _dead_ and shed not a single tear. The horror of it is suffocating, and Celegorm has Curufin, and Amras still has Caranthir, but I stand here alone and I feel Maitimo’s absence like a lost limb. I want my brother, I want Maitimo here to kiss my brow and tell me it is not shameful to cry; I want Maitimo to reassure me it will all be well, in the end. Somehow, it will be well.

(Despair is safer than hope. I cannot want Maitimo ever again.)

*

Before—

Before, I slept in a small room I shared with Maedhros. I do not go back to that room now, terrified of whatever I will find there: Maedhros’ poor change of clothing, his unmade bed, the comb that I know is actually Mother’s comb, taken from the kit she left at Losgar and hidden away even from Athair, but not from me. The biscuit I had saved for him from supper and he never touched. The deck of cards he carried like a talisman. The socks he kept forgetting to put away in his pack. All the harmless little pieces of his life he thought he would come back to. What am I to do with those? I am too much a coward to face it, and so I hide in my younger brothers’ room, where Amras is no longer screaming but also not speaking, lying curled up with his head on Caranthir’s knee, his face flushed and swollen with his tears and his eyes dimmed like dead eyes with the salt. He has not moved since I entered the room, but he is not sleeping, so I feel I cannot ask Caranthir about him, lest he hear me.

Caranthir has folded himself small into his usual sullen silence again, and does not look at me. One hand strokes through Amras’ red hair in soothing rhythm, as though it were Huan’s head, and not Amras’, that he bore on his knee. His other hand, his right hand, is clenched in a fist. He keeps staring at it, and once he flexes the fingers out, stiffly, but they shake, and he quickly curls them in again. 

I want to ask him what happened, in the days he was gone; I want to know if he knows how our brothers died.

I cannot ask him.

“Caranthir,” I croak at last, into the horrible quiet. He does not stir. I draw from around my neck the silver medal I have been wearing on its fine chain, ever since I found it laid atop my pack two days prior. I crouch down beside him and try to put it in his closed hand, but his fingers are strong and I cannot pry them apart, so I lay it on top of his knuckles, instead. 

Slowly, I hear his breathing shake. He opens those stubborn fingers like the movement is an effort of will, and the chain tangles between them, the little carven image of Saint Dominic falling into his open palm. Caranthir looks at it in silence, his breath whistling between his teeth. 

Then he hurls it from him, and it hits the wall, falling to the floor with a clatter. 

“Get out, Maglor,” he grates, still refusing to look at me. But I can see he is crying again.

What happened, those two days?

The sudden movement and sound of the medal being thrown did not make Amras even flinch. He lies there like death, and somewhere Amrod really _is_ dead, his face maybe a face just like this: grey and glazed and empty of everything he was. Everything I loved. 

I stand up, and I get out.

*

Alone, I pace down the hallway. It is late night now, the moon high in a clear dark sky through each narrow window I pass, surrounded by the infinite multitude of sharp Western stars. Where am I to go? I cannot bear to return to Celegorm, and I dare not venture out to the courtyard, for fear of meeting one of either Rumil’s men demanding answers about their dead, or Athair’s men—my men—wanting to know has happened to my brothers. How am I to answer either question, when I have not yet dared ask those questions myself? I must demand details from Celegorm, I know, but—not yet. Please, not yet.

In my desire to hide I consider even fleeing to Athair’s hateful diamond mine, where no one but my brothers could possibly find me, but before I can make up my mind I hear my name called, and I turn with ill-disguised dread to see one of Rumil’s guards approaching me—not Ulfang, which is a small mercy, but a man both shorter and older than myself, with dirty yellow hair and skin like tanned leather. He has his gun at his belt, and one of our heavy leather vests wrapped around his torso, which means he must be currently on guard duty at the wall top. When I turn to meet him, he nods to me with the barest insolent hint of a bow. 

“Beg pardon for disturbing you, sir,” he says as he draws near, “but Ulfang said it’d be best to fetch you. There’s a woman at the gate asking to speak to you, you see, and she won’t leave the wall unless you come.”

For a long moment, I can do nothing but stare. 

“I . . . Am sorry?” I manage at last, very faintly. “A woman? Here for me?”

_(Amrod fled to send word to Mother, is the traitorous thought that I cannot send away quick enough, no matter how impossible it is—)_

The guard is smirking a little, though he tries to hide it. 

“Well, actually sir, she says she will only speak to the Irishman’s eldest son,” he explains, looking both exasperated and amused. “I told her he isn’t here, but she insists. So Ulfang said to fetch you, since—well, the Irishman’s eldest son? That’s you now, isn’t it.”

I know what his amusement is about; I never saw Maedhros so much as touch a woman, since we arrived in Mithrim, but of course there were rumors. I knew it, and Maedhros knew it—I think the whole damn fort knew it, except maybe Athair. I hate this man. This woman, whoever she is—I want to hate her, too. I don’t want to meet her. My brother is dead, and all his sins with him; why can they not leave him in peace?

“Is she armed?” I manage to ask. 

He shrugs. “She’s one of the town prostitutes, sir. I’ve seen her before. She ain’t a fighter.”

“I don’t want to see her,” I say, unable to bear this any longer. “Tell her so, and if she wants to spend all night outside the gate, and all day, even, then so be it; her errand is not my concern. Let her starve there, for all I care.”

“We told her as much,” the guard replies. “But she says you will see her, and when Ulfang went out to try driving her off, she gave him this.”

He is holding out his hand, which I had not noticed before, in my distress.

I glance down, ready to curse him and send him away, consequences be damned—but the air stops in my lungs.

Caught between his crooked fingers, tied with thin cord, is a single lock of hair.

Even in the moonlight, it gleams red.


	3. Chapter 3

_I hear the door fumble open behind me, though not any sound of pursuit, because the carpeting in our father’s house here in New York is thick enough to muffle most footfalls. Stubborn in my hurt, I neither slow nor turn around even when I hear my name called._

_“Maglor?”_

_“Go away,” I tell Maedhros bitterly, without looking around. In my embarrassment at being upset—and my upset at being embarrassed—I can feel my entire face glowing hot, surely nearly as red as Caranthir gets when he is in one of his rages. The notion of closely resembling my moody baby brother is even more humiliating, especially as I know I am overreacting. I hunch my shoulders, shoving my fists even deeper into the pockets of my dressing gown._

_Sometimes, I cannot help overreacting. Why must Maedhros always remain so confoundedly_ calm? __

_“Maglor.” The door shuts, cutting off the sound of Fingon and Finrod arguing good-naturedly about who is to finish the last of the cakes before bed. I speed up my pace a little, but I know it is hopeless; my brother’s legs are so very long, and he is light-footed as a fae from one of Grandfather Finwe’s stories._

_I only know he has caught up to me when his breath tickles suddenly warm in the shell of my ear, in a very quiet and slightly off-key sing-song: “Ma-ca-lau-re . . .”_

_I do not quite manage to maintain my scowl, which I know he sees because as he settles into step beside me he smiles, looking pleased with himself._

_“You are incorrigible.”_

_“And you are a dear,” he responds with a grin, and leans a little to kiss me lightly, right on the part of my hair._

_“Ugh,” I complain, as I shove him away. He sways away easily with the force of my shove, and then straightens gracefully, looking slightly more sober._

_“I did not mean to offend,” He offers, as we turn the corner and emerge into the main entrance hall, where the grand staircase ascends to our private quarters. I have my own room, and so does Maedhros; a luxury only life in the city can afford us. We start up the stairs, Maedhros lithe and barefoot as he always likes best, and I flapping beside him in my favourite slippers. I must still look sulky, because he continues, earnest as only he can be._

_“Truly, I did not. I let you make a mockery of me first, didn’t I?”_

_“That wasn’t even a mockery,” I fling back. He raises his eyebrows, Mother’s dimples threatening to reappear at the corners of his not-quite-solemn mouth. In a game of charades (the very same game I just exited so ignominiously) I had pantomimed my brother to our cousins by pretending to be taller than I am, to be handsomer than I am, and to be certainly far more fond of Fingon than I am. How is that mockery, if all I did was show off all the things that make Maedhros so much better than me?_

_“Oh, I see. So I do preen like that in every glass I pass by, is that it?”_

_“No one would fault you if you did.”_

_“You made me absolutely outrageous, Maglor,” Maedhros says, fluttering his eyelashes much in the same way I had when we were in the parlor moments before. I consider._

_“Not . . . quite outrageous, I think.”_

_“It certainly outraged Fingon.”_

_I cannot help the quirk of my lips as I remember the look on our cousin’s face when I had tackled him in a flying embrace and called him_ Cano. __

_“Well . . . Even so. I only made fun of how . . . Good you are.”_

_“And you think I did not?”_

_“You showed me as fastidious and high-strung and emotional. And all of it is truth, so I should not be upset, I know! And yet here I am,” I gesture despairingly, “making that truth even more true. Oh, I should go back down to apologize and bid them good night.”_

_“Oh, don’t trouble yourself over that—you know the Fins don’t mind. In fact, I daresay they didn’t even notice you were in a temper; I would wager that Fingon thinks that is how you always exit the room when you are retiring for the night.”_

_I groan. “That is not comforting.”_

_He elbows me: “And yet: you are smiling.”_

_We reach my bedroom door first, as Maedhros’ is a little further down the hall. I open the door and step inside, but I do not close it, and there at the threshold of the doorframe Maedhros hesitates for the first time._

_“This is not really about that silly game, is it, Maglor.”_

_My voice sticks in my throat. I shrug, trying for some of Maedhros’ own deadly brand of flippancy, but I am certain I only look wretched. My certainty is confirmed when Maedhros follows me into my room, his look now one of open concern. Instead of meeting his eyes, I cross to my desk and begin sorting through the papers there, just to be doing something._

_“Maglor.” Maedhros’ voice is gentle, and my fingers still on the sheets of musical composition, my latest attempt at hymnmaking that I had been hoping to surprise Mother with, when we returned home. “It is only a few days.”_

_“Easy enough for you to say,” I burst out, turning to face my brother at last, “with Grandfather keeping you back a week. I’m the one that will have to navigate an entire week at Formenos alone. Seven days, Maitimo! I won’t survive.”_

_Maedhros looks at me, askance, but I cannot quite read the note in his voice when he repeats: “Alone?”_

_“Oh, you know what I mean.” I drop onto my bed and fling an arm over my eyes. “I will be expected to mind the children, but the children all hate me. They won’t listen to me. They only listen to you.”_

_“Now you are being dramatic,” Maedhros informs me, wandering over to my shelves to peruse their contents—as if he has not read every novel I own twice over!_

_“I am not,” I retort. “Melancholy, certainly, but not_ dramatic. _”_

_“There you are,” Maedhros replies, with a smile in his voice I can hear clear as song, even if I cannot see his face. I peer out from beneath my elbow to see he still has his back to me, his slender fingers tipping slowly across the spines of the books on my shelves. A pianist’s hands, I think, not for the first time. “Not sad, not upset, but_ melancholy. _Dramatic.”_

_Reluctantly I sit up, picking nervously at my fingernails._

_“Curufin bites,” I tell my hands, mournfully._

_Maedhros turns around at that, and this time his amusement is clear, as he joins me on the edge of my bed. He leans back on his hands and tilts his head to look at me, his smile very slight and crooked and the most comforting thing I know._

_“Not for a few years now, as far as I know,” Maedhros says. “But if you are that worried about it, simply leave him to Celegorm; Lord knows Celegorm’s been bit by enough small creatures that Curufin’s teeth can’t daunt him. The twins will behave at bedtime if you promise to reward them with stories—or a song, Maglor, you must remember how they love to hear your singing. And Celegorm really does want to be helpful, even if he grumbles about it. Be friendly with him, and don’t mind anything cruel he might say, for his tempers are violent but always quickly done with. You remember what you were like at thirteen, don’t you?”_

_“Yes; and the thought is not an encouraging one,” I mutter. Maedhros laughs. I watch him, and the knot in my throat tightens a little with shame, because I really was a selfish boy, and I am still selfish now that I am practically a man._

_(I remember what I was like at thirteen, but maybe more strongly I remember Maedhros at thirteen—for that was the year Athair was away, and Maedhros changed from the older brother I knew to someone quieter, paler, and thinner; someone with starving eyes and bleeding hands.)_

_“Chin up,” Maedhros says. “I will be there to farewell you tomorrow morning, and those seven days will fly by, once you are home again. I will be following after to join you before you have even had time to miss me. I promise.”_

_I miss him already, knowing we are to be parted on the morrow, but I do not say so. I remember my brother when he was thirteen, and all the complaints he could have voiced but never did, and I bite my tongue._

_“Well, I should make certain our cousins have found their rooms, and arrange for an early breakfast,” Maedhros says after we sit a moment together in the quiet. “I cannot send you home to mamaí unfed—nor send you to our brothers entirely exhausted, either, so make sure you get some proper sleep amidst your fretting. All right?”_

_I nod, and Maedhros smiles again._

_“Brave heart, Maglor.” My brother says fondly, as he sets one arm reassuringly around my shoulders, leaning his bright head a moment against mine. “Do not worry so much! They all do love you, you know. And so do I.”_

*

The door, when it rebounds off the wall, makes a sound like a gunshot. Huan scrambles past me through the narrow doorway, into Athair’s room, but still I reach Celegorm faster than he does; with both hands I seize my brother by the collar, heave him to his feet, and slam him back against the wall. Celegorm is surprised, so he does not fight back; if he had, I would never have the strength to manhandle him so. From where he had been crouched on the floor beside Celegorm, Curufin leaps up with a strange, whining cry. He lunges at me and claws at my arm trying to pull me back, but I ignore him. I ignore, too, Huan’s agitated huffing at my hip, as he tries to force his long, shaggy body between me and my brothers.

Celegorm’s breathing whistles in his throat; his eyes are white all around, as he stares at me. His hands are on my wrists, but he does not break my hold, doesn’t do anything but stare, gasping. 

There are new tear tracks, wet and shining on his face.

“What does this mean?” I cry, shaking Celegorm by the front of his shirt like I can force the truth from him, forgetting in my distress that he stands a full three inches taller than me. “You said they were dead! You told everyone our brothers are dead! Why then do they send me this?”

Celegorm looks stricken, his reddened eyes wide as he sees what I clutch in my hand. He rips himself out of my grip—he is so strong, my little brother, the hunter, the murderer—and his breathing quickens.

“Maedhros,” Celegorm says, and his voice shakes, almost as badly as his hands do as he fumbles the lock of copper-red hair from my own fingers, and holds it closer to the lamp. “It—it’s Maedhros. They have Maedhros. Oh, my God.”

“Alive?” My voice cracks on the word, all my music gone. Curufin and Huan both push between us, now that I’ve lost my hold on Celegorm’s collar, but I do not fight them. Curufin’s face is white, his eyes darting back and forth: he looks at me; at Celegorm; at the hair in Celegorm’s hand. He does not step close to examine the hair himself; he looks afraid of it.

“Who is _they,_ ” he asks sharply. “Who sent that to you?”

“There is a woman,” I say faintly, and I have to put out one of my empty hands against the wall, to steady myself on suddenly trembling knees as the full enormity of my shock hits me. “I think—she must be from Mairon, mustn’t she? She’s at the wall, she wants to tell me something, oh my _God_ , what do I do?”

“If it is Mairon, Maedhros could still be dead,” Curufin says quickly, his thin boy’s hand reaching out to clutch at Celegorm’s wrist much the way I was moments before. 

My hands go to my own hair as my legs give out entirely and I slide down the wall until I am kneeling on the floor, shivering as I try to stay calm, to _think._

“It—might not be Maedhros,” I choke. “It could be either of them. Their hair is so close in color.”

Celegorm shakes his head. 

“They killed Amrod. But I never found—I never found Maedhros.”

I have always been terrified of heights. On the long road west—-in the mountains up north, on the lips of the canyons in Utah—there were so many times I looked out over the fearsome vistas spread below us and felt my heart racing, felt lightheaded as I suddenly could not breathe through the fear and the awe.

Now, I look at Celegorm, and it is like I am standing at the edge of a cliff, looking down.

Somehow, I manage to whisper: “You found?”

“I found,” Celegorm begins, and makes a sudden sharp sound midway between a sob and a gag, and shakes his head. His complexion has gone horribly grey again, grey as it had been in the courtyard. “Maglor,” he begs, “don’t ask me, you mustn’t ask me, because I can’t—I can’t—I—You must trust me. He’s dead, Amrod is _dead_ , and I thought that must mean that Maedhros too was—was—god _damn_ them, I thought—“

“Shh,” Curufin whispers, and he reaches up to rest one of his hands gently along the side of Celegorm’s jaw, quieting him. I cannot see his face, only Celegorm’s.

And I am a coward; I do not ask. Or maybe I am kind, because I have never seen my brother this shaken before tonight, and whatever he has seen—would I demand he see it again?

Would I demand he make _me_ see?

Celegorm swallows once, and then again, and holds the poor shorn hair close to his lips for a moment, closing his eyes. 

“They washed it,” he says after a pause. “Maedhros left with his hair still unwashed after Utumno, but it smells like lye and nothing else.”

“What does that mean?” I ask, stupefied, and my brother’s eyes are dull as he pulls away from Curufin to return the hair to my outstretched palm. Curufin clenches his fists, his breathing too high and too fast, but he does not answer; Celegorm does.

“It means they do not want us to know he was bleeding,” he says, flatly, and he stoops to the floor to lift his gun belt up from where it lies in a heap. He slings it about his waist and pulls the buckle tight.

“Celegorm,” Curufin says, for once sounding no longer like Athair. Instead, he sounds like merely himself, the boy I have watched grow up. “They’re only trying to hurt us. They won’t give Maedhros back.“

Celegorm ignores him, and turns to me.

“I’m going with you,” he tells me, and I do not gainsay him.


	4. Chapter 4

The days have been warm, lately, but the dark of predawn is still bitterly cold. I shiver beneath the weight of my heavy riding coat, gripping the folded note tightly in my clenched hand with fingers long since gone stiff with the chill. I have read and reread the words written there dozens of times, since I went from Athair’s room to the courtyard with Celegorm and bade the men open the gate. 

_(Eastern wall. Dawn. Come alone.)_

The woman had been small, slight, and clearly terrified, as she thrust a paper envelope into my hands. She did not know anything, not even what was in the envelope, and could say only that she had been given the message by another woman, not by Mairon at all.

(She flinched at the sound of Mairon’s name, but so do all who live in these parts; it could mean nothing.)

I sent her to the women’s quarters to remain under guard until we return from this parley. The women who marched her away were not gentle, for they still feel keenly the loss of Jem, who had been their leader. Still, Celegorm argued I was too lenient. Maybe I am. But I cannot kill a woman in cold blood—not even one who might have come from Mairon himself.

(One of her fingers had been missing.)

“Someone is coming,” Celegorm grits from his place at my right, and I snap my mind back from its wandering, staring ahead of us into the darkness. A darkness that is not so very dark, now; the sun is not yet risen over the hills, but rumor of its coming has lightened the sky from inky black to a dusty lavender, and all the stars have fled. Behind me, Mithrim is quiet. I forbade any man from showing himself, while we treat with Mairon’s messenger, on pain of death. 

_Come alone,_ the note said.

*

_“A woman’s handwriting,” Celegorm agreed with me, once the messenger girl was taken away. “Maybe she wrote it herself. It could be another trap.”_

_“They will not try anything so close to our walls,” I had countered, mind racing. “I can go out alone, and they do not know the range of our weapons, nor their accuracy, but I do. I can make certain we meet within shot of Athair’s guns, you can cover me from the wall top—”_

_“Like hell I can,” Celegorm cut me off. “I am going with you.”_

_“You can’t. It says to go alone.”_

_“We are alone, Maglor,” Celegorm said as we approached Athair’s door. “All of us.”_

_Inside, there had been not only Curufin waiting for our return; not only Huan, who leapt up to lick at Celegorm’s hands. There was also a frantic Caranthir and Amras, who threw themselves at me as soon as I opened the door, begging to know if Curufin’s news is true, if Maedhros is alive._

_(I saw past them to where Curufin stood, and I saw him smile.)_

*

A horsed rider is approaching us, along the path from town. There is no urgency to the horse’s pace, so I have time to examine the figure in the saddle, though there is little I can discern; whoever it is has wrapped themselves closely in a black riding cloak, hood raised to obscure the face. Only when the rider is quite close can I make out the slender hands at the reins, and the small, delicately shaped riding boots in the stirrups. She rides astride as a man would, but—

_A woman’s handwriting, Celegorm had said._

Beside me, Celegorm is stiff with tension, one hand to Athair’s piece at his hip, waiting. On my other side, Caranthir draws a shaky breath, and I feel more than see him reach out to take Amras’ hand. Curufin stands on Celegorm’s other side, and I do not hear him move. 

None of my brothers would be left behind, when they heard what the stakes of this meeting are. Even Amras, when he saw my reluctance, shook his head, biting his lip.

“Don’t leave me alone,” he had whispered, his voice scarcely a voice at all. And I had seen the rekindled will in his eyes, in his face still swollen with his weeping, and I had not been able to deny him. 

( _You should not have told them,_ I heard Celegorm hiss furiously to Curufin, as Caranthir and Amras tore from the room to retrieve their guns and ammunition belts. And Curufin, very softly: _They deserved to know._ )

Only once the rider is nearly upon us, at last, does Curufin stir, and murmur just loud enough for me to hear:

“Don’t trust her. Whatever she says, don’t trust her.”

“Stop where you are,” I shout, my voice loud and clear enough to cut the dawn air like a knife. “Not another step. Dismount, or my brothers will shoot.”

The rider halts. She dismounts easily, with no stiffness, so she cannot have ridden very long; only from the town, most likely. When she is standing on her own feet she reaches up and pulls back the hood of her mantle, to show a beautiful face, dark-eyed, painted so it is difficult to tell her age, though I am certain she is not above thirty-five. Her hair is dark and thick, untouched by any grey, and when she pushes her cloak back I see she does not wear any shawl to cover herself, her pale neck exposed and her breasts half-so, for her dress is cut for a brothel, not for travel. She seems not to notice her own immodesty, as she strips off her riding gloves to reveal her long-nailed hands, but I am not a fool. I know whatever she does now is performance, every choice calculated for effect. What I do not know is why. 

“Who among you is eldest?” she asks, her slight accent not one I am familiar with. Though she asks the question, her eyes are already fixed on me, even before I step forward. 

“I am eldest here,” I reply, evenly, “but I am not the eldest.”

I hold up the paper she sent me, and then rip it in half, flinging the pieces to the ground at my feet. 

“Nor are you alone,” she says, entirely unfazed. 

“Whatever you have to say is for all of us to hear,” I answer. “Answer first: did Mairon send you?”

One dark brow lifts, slightly, at the name; she shakes her head as though at a poor joke.

“My name is Thuringwethil,” she says, smiling a slow smile as she tilts her head, surveying us one by one like she is comparing us to—something. 

“Your brother did not know my name, when he met me the first time. He knows it now.”

She is watching me, when she says that, her smile a delicate thing, sharp and fine as a dagger. I try not to think about what she is saying, about what she means by _the first time_ —this woman who sent a prostitute as her messenger, who stands before us with her throat and shoulders bare, her hair unbound. 

Instead, I cling frantically to the plain meaning of her words, not to the shameful implications: _He knows it now. He_ knows. _He is alive._

“What have you done with him,” I demand, my fingers clenched so they do not fidget or shake. There shall be blood beneath my fingernails, before I am finished here, as I press harder into my palms. “He cannot be dead, or you would not think you could strike a bargain. So where is he?”

“Your brother has a queer habit,” she says, conversationally, “of biting his lip when he is in pain. Did you know that?”

Behind me, Caranthir whimpers, very quietly. Desperately, with all my soul, I beg him silently to be still, to make no sound.

“If you have hurt him,” I say in a voice low and terrible, sounding for maybe the first time in my life like Athair’s son, “I will kill you all, and you shall be first, woman or no.” 

“My, how you frighten me,” Thuringwethil smiles, pressing one long-taloned hand dramatically to her breast. “And here I thought you such a gentleman.” 

“Where is he,” I repeat. I will not be distracted. The woman’s smile sharpens.

“Why,” she asks gently, “would I be telling you that? And yet: I am generous. Know this, at least: the Irishman’s eldest son is indeed now the houseguest of the one you know as Mairon, and of my lord and master, Bauglir himself. And know this too: He was not yet grievously harmed, when I left him.”

The world around me—stops.

I have seen Melkor Bauglir only once, despite all the ways he has ruined my life. I was a child of barely eleven at the time, when I saw his long white face grinning in the dark at my mother’s door; when I saw Maedhros try to stand against him, a boy of thirteen and not yet grown tall, stepping into our father’s empty place. Bauglir had seized my brother easily then, and called him a child, but he had looked at him—even as Maedhros had struggled to pull free—as though he were not even a boy at all. 

I never saw my brother afraid, before that night.

“You lie,” I manage to force out. “Bauglir is not here. He is in the east, in New York.”

“Oh, your information is very much out of date, little poet,” Thuringwethil laughs. “My master has been here now some months, and it is at his bidding that I am here now. He was very grieved, to learn your father was dead.”

“Bullshit,” Celegorm snarls as he moves forward to stand beside me, finally goaded beyond silence. “Bauglir killed our grandfather. He wanted our father dead.”

“Perhaps.” Thuringwethil regards Celegorm with new interest. “Yet not by any hand but his own.”

“Why then has he not killed Maedhros?” I challenge. My heart is racing, and I feel sick; I force the nausea down. “If Bauglir is really here, and has my brother captive as you say—“

“Oh, he is certainly not dead,” Thuringwethil says, sounding almost bored now as she turns back to me from Celegorm. “I could say we shall make him long for death, but he has desired death a long time hence, has he not? Macalaure.”

Her gaze and her smile sharpen all at once, as she watches for my reaction, and I—

I am going to be sick. I am honestly, truly, God as my witness, going to be sick.

“That is not my name,” I force out, ragged. Her eyes widen.

“Is it not? But that is what he called you, in my room.”

I go all over cold. Behind me, Caranthir stirs.

“What does she mean?” I hear him whisper, sounding almost frantic with distress. “What does she mean, in her room?”

(Macalaure, _Maitimo had gasped, when I held him. When I told him he was safe. In that briefest moment of merciful confusion that he had, between remembering everything that happened before, and living everything that happened after.)_

“You were not there,” I whisper. She laughs. 

“Not I! I left my own spies behind, for that. Think you I wished to linger to meet Finwe’s famously wild-tempered son, after marking his heir a whore?”

A strangled oath beside me, and a scuffle; I barely recognize the voice as Celegorm’s. I feel his breath hot and shaking against my nape; he must have lunged forward, but someone dragged him back. 

“Wait,” I hear Curufin whisper behind me, into Celegorm’s ear. “ _Wait._ ”

“What would you have me do?” I ask. I try to imagine what my father would have done, or how Maedhros would have looked, when treating with monsters, that I might know what to do now. But therein lies my flaw: I have never been able to anticipate the things my father and my older brother did.

“The claim to your father’s land, and all the wealth to be mined from it,” Thuringwethil says. “The escaped slave, which your father stole from my master years before. The secrets of your father’s weapons, both their craft and their use. Restitution paid, for those of our men you have killed. All this, to be delivered to my master Bauglir, in three days’ time. Once you pay these things, we will let your brother go. You may meet me on the road north out of town, to hand them over. I think you shall not have much trouble recapturing the slave,” she adds, still smiling. “I hear he trusts you.”

“And the alternative?” I manage to counter. I see Thuringwethil’s tongue dart, lizardlike, between her smiling teeth.

“Your brother dies,” she says. “A single bullet to ruin that lovely face, and any number of ravines to throw the body down. Deny my master any of his desires, and you shall never see your Maitimo again.”

I have seen what a bullet to the skull does, before. The bullet has been _mine._

This bullet, too, shall be mine.

“I must speak with my brothers,” I say, this time unable to keep my voice steady, and this woman looks at me and laughs, because I think she knows what my answer must be.

“Then speak,” she says. “But I shall have your reply, before you leave this place.”

*

I lead my brothers a little away, so that Bauglir’s woman may not overhear our debate. Amras keeps so close to me he is practically clinging to my coatsleeve; Celegorm lingers, his hand never straying from Athair’s gun at his hip, and even as we withdraw he does not leave off staring at the woman, his shoulders so tense I can see the hard line of them even beneath his heavy leather coat. 

“We cannot give up Rumil,” is what I say first, and instantly I know I have made a mistake, because that is what makes Celegorm’s gaze snap at last from the woman’s face to mine. My brother’s face is carved with grief, and with a cold, hard rage I have never seen in his expression before.

“Why not?” He challenges, teeth bared like a dog in pain. “Why not, for Maitimo?”

I stammer.

“It would be murder,” I manage, “and a betrayal of a friend—“

“He might be dying anyway,” Celegorm counters, sounding almost vicious. I flinch back—another mistake. “And you want to protect him? _Him_ , over Maedhros? It is his fault that Amrod is dead!”

‘Shut your goddamn mouth, Celegorm,” Caranthir cries, but he is looking at Amras, who has gone white as a ghost. Caranthir rarely swears. His outburst shocks us all to silence, and it is Curufin who speaks next, careful and slow. He picks through his words like a vulture picking through bones, hunting what is already dead.

“Maglor is correct; we cannot betray Rumil. Not while we must live in Mithrim at the mercy of his followers, for they are more numerous by far than our own, and now Athair is—gone. What do you think will happen, if we sell their leader’s life for our brother’s? They shall kill us themselves or drive us out to where Mairon is waiting, and that too shall mean death—for all of us, not merely Maedhros.”

“We have to beg more time,” Amras says. “If—If we have more time, we can send out scouts, we can search, pick up a trail, find where they are keeping him—“

“And then do what?” Curufin says bitterly. “Inform the sheriff that a man wanted for eight murders is in peril? Do we save him from a swift death only for the cell and the trial and the noose? Or do you forget he is wanted for Losgar, still, and more besides, just as Celegorm is? Just as _I_ am?”

“We have our own men,” Amras begins to retort, hot with a pale version of Athair’s rage, but Curufin shakes his head.

“We have our own men, but not enough. We have a defensible position, not an invading force. And Melkor has wealth, power, and enough men in his employ to set spies for us all the way from Missouri to the coast, and perhaps even further back. There are no maps of these mountains. We would never find him.”

“Finrod had maps,” Caranthir says.

“Finrod is not here!” Curufin snaps. 

“Stop,” I beg, stepping between them. “Celegorm, do you think you could track this woman back to wherever they have Maedhros?”

Celegorm shakes his head, just once. 

“She won’t go back there,” he says. “She will know we would try to follow. I am certain that girl we have in Mithrim now is one of her spies, and she must have many others, many ways to get word to Bauglir without being traced. If we refuse the terms, she will send word and Maedhros will die. If we accept, all she need do is wait out the three days. I already searched the woods, and the foothills. I found—nothing.”

His voice jerks a little on the last word. I try not to show that I noticed.

“Then let us use her spy against her,” Amras is saying. “We can offer to make a trade.”

Curufin’s laugh is sharp and derisive: “She does not care about that harlot, or she would not have sent her into our arms. And the same can be said, despite all her posturing, about how Bauglir has sent _her_ , too. He will happily see either of them dead, I promise you. We have nothing to bargain with except what he demands, and we cannot hand that over. This is not a debate: _We can not do what Bauglir wants._ Look how silent Maglor is; it is because he knows this is the truth. Remember what we promised Athair.”

“Maitimo was the first to make that promise,” Caranthir chokes. “And Athair is dead.”

“But Maedhros is not!” Celegorm snarls, whipping from Curufin, to me, like a beast at bay. “Damn you all, why don’t you understand? Maitimo is _alive_ , and we should do anything they want, _anything_ , to get him back. What matter our promises now? What matter our oaths? It’s all merely _words!_ ”

“Maitimo would not want,” I begin, weakly, but Celegorm explodes: “You do not know what he would want, Maglor, because he is not here!”

Do I not know what he would want? Or have I merely always been too selfish, too cowardly, to listen?

In my silence, Celegorm stalks forward and grips me by the arm, his face so close to mine. I read the desperation there as clearly as I have ever read anything, and I wonder what he sees, looking at me.

“Maglor,” Celegorm tells me hoarsely, suddenly quiet, his words scarcely words at all. “Maglor, I found Amrod.”

His fingers, tight against my wrist, are icy cold. I look with fright towards Amras, but Amras is raging at Curufin, and Caranthir with him, and they do not hear.

No one hears, but me.

“Damn you, Maglor, look at me,” Celegorm hisses, shaking me. “Amrod—drowned. They forced him off a cliff’s edge, and he fell a great distance, and then he drowned. I found him downriver, and I buried him there, and he’s gone, he was gone already for _days_ —“

His whole body catches on the words, like they are ripped out of him, and his mouth trembles like a child’s mouth as he grips my wrist tightly enough to bruise. 

“But Maglor—Maitimo isn’t gone yet. Maitimo is right _there._ ”

I try to speak, but all I can do is sob. Celegorm watches me cry, and does not offer me anything—no comfort, no pity. He looks at me with the same eyes that saw our baby brother dead. What pity can there be in him, after that?

“Please,” he begs. “Maglor, please—you know, you _know_ that Maedhros would not leave you to die.”

The pain of what I must do is so thick in my throat, I can barely breathe. But I know Thuringwethil can still see me from where she stands, and so I fight back my weeping, lifting my chin, gazing at my brother with eyes that can hardly see at all.

“He would not have to,” I tell Celegorm, my voice breaking, “because he would not have let me go alone.”

*

“You have your answer for me, then?” Thuringwethil calls, as we approach her once more, my brothers following my lead. I can feel Amras’ helpless fear at my back like a thing burning, and Caranthir’s rage hot beside him. Curufin’s face is set and calm at my left; at my right, Celegorm stalks like a hunting cat, wrapped in his coat, his eyes fixed on Bauglir’s servant. 

The sun has fully risen now, the sky showing cloudless and blue. The air is very quiet, and not as cold as it was.

I open my mouth, to say what I must say, but at the very edge of voice I quail, and I can make no sound. Thuringwethil sees this, and smiles. Her teeth are sharp. I remember the wound on my brother’s throat, and a fury rises in me, almost hot enough to overwhelm my grief, a torment so great it feels like my heart is being rent in two. It feels like going mad. 

“If you are needing any help deciding,” Thuringwethil says kindly, “I think he would want you to let him die.” 

I have always been selfish. I have always needed my brother. He has always given up everything, for me.

Maedhros tried to need me once—only once, when he wavered outside the shadow of Mithrim’s walls, after Athair died—and I pushed him away and I told him: _Go._

This will be my last memory of him.

I look this woman squarely in the eye, and I force the words out, slowly, clearly.

“We cannot accept your terms.”

Behind me, Amras whimpers.

“Then Maedhros dies,” is Thuringwethil’s calm reply. She does not sound surprised. She tilts her head again, regarding me slowly, but the satisfaction is clear in her voice. “A pity, to make a corpse of such a man, so soon. Perhaps I can beg from my master a few days’ mercy, so that I can farewell him properly. No one should go to their death feeling unloved, and certainly not a one as fair as that one.”

She grins at me.

“Shall I tell him you wept, when you cast him aside? Or do you not want him to know?”

In her gloating, she forgets to be wary. She leans forward as she mocks me, her dark eyes fixed hungrily on my face, loving the pain I know she sees there. She drinks it in, and I do not hide my tears, I hide nothing from her, nothing—

(Except one thing: That when I stood aside with Celegorm holding tight to my wrist, when I wept and I knew she watched my tears, I stepped to shield Celegorm’s hand from her sight, and I bade Celegorm unsheathe his knife.)

Thuringwethil steps close, too close. I stand my ground, and do not shrink away, and she is given no warning before Celegorm is on her in a leap, hunting knife to her throat, hand in her hair. She wrenches back, too late. When she feels Celegorm’s blade at her neck, she freezes, arms stiff at her sides.

“Do you know?” He grates out, hoarse between snarling teeth. “Do you know, what it is you did to him?”

She sneers, breathless, hatred and fascination warring in her eyes as she stares up at him: “Of course.”

And her hand, which had been moving stealthily unseen, suddenly strikes snake-quick, ripping a thin blade from a hidden pocket of her skirts and stabbing up towards my brother’s ribs where he stretches over her, open to the blow. 

I do not even have time to scream—

But Celegorm is faster than I am.

My brother twists, and the blow that should have struck him deep glances instead off the heavy leather of his coat. His face, too, twists, so I know the knife did not miss him entirely, but before Thuringwethil can strike again he wrenches her head back, slamming her down onto the dirt path with his knee driven hard into her chest, and then—

Celegorm cuts her throat.

*

My brother knows how to kill a man, and he knows how to kill an animal. Thuringwethil, he butchers as he would a beast, the knife sliding deep and curving wide. He drops her body to the dust, and she spasms there only once before going still, her dark riding mantle spread like bat’s wings beneath her, her head at a terrible, wrong angle. I am glad her face is away from me, so that I do not see the open wound, or most of the blood. I can smell it, though; hot and copper, red in the air’s chill. 

The noise she makes, as she tries to breathe through the blood, stops almost instantly.

My brother throws the knife down, and reaches up to grip at his own hair, his hands gloved with her blood. He is crying; his eyes are awful, not my brother’s eyes at all. Curufin goes to his side, and puts his arms around him, soothing, and presses one hand to the place on Celegorm’s shirt where blood is spreading. Huan whines at his heel.

Caranthir drops to his knees. Amras, white-faced, clutches at my arm.

“Maglor,” he says, horrified, “Maglor, what will they do, now that their messenger is dead? How will we get Maedhros back?”

“Maedhros is not coming back,” I tell him, and suddenly it’s real. Suddenly it is a thing I can never go back from. I pull my godson, my littlest brother, into an embrace that he tries briefly to fight against, but all the fight has gone out of him, all his boy’s strength run out with his grief. Amras collapses against me and wails thinly, pressing his face against the hollow of my shoulder. 

I kiss my brother’s bright copper head, and hold him tightly. 

“I’m sorry,” I whisper, the world around me blurring with my tears. “Maedhros is dead.”

*

_I would rather die here,_ I had read in Maedhros’ eyes that night, in that room. It was maybe the last time I understood him clearly, and I had refused to let him go. If I could go back, if I could change anything—

No, I would not change that. I would change everything that happened before: every town, every decision, every step since Ulmo’s Bridge. Every man who died there, while my mother screamed. I would change how I let my father lock my mother away, that fateful night; I would change our oathtaking, and Grandfather Finwe’s death, and the pistol my father held to my uncle’s breast, when he thought himself betrayed.

How much of my life must be unlived, to go back to a time when we were happy?

I remember that brand I held, brilliantly reflective over the dark water; I remember how I had thought, as I set the flames, that I did it for _him._

All the evils I have done, I did because of the people I love.

This: This is the worst thing of all.


End file.
